The African Desert Is A Perfect Place For Terror Groups To Grow

Africa Desert Helps Breed Radicals, From Al Shabab To Boko Haram To Mr. Marlboro -- Christian Science Monitor

'Sahelistan' is what the French foreign minister calls the sub-Saharan zone of Sahel. Al Qaeda-linked groups from places like Mail and Nigeria have been driven into hiding there and hit Western targets. The zone may become a 'breeding ground' for terrorists, says the UN Security Council.

Africa's Sahel belt is a 600-mile-wide semiarid zone stretching from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east. The vast, seemingly ungovernable terrain has become a sanctuary for Islamist militants.

After the Arab Spring, and then at the end of Muammar Qaddafi's dictatorship, many hoped for an end to terror in the Sahel.

Instead, weapons spilling out of Libya and ongoing military efforts to drive Al Qaeda-linked groups from places like Mali and Nigeria have hardened Islamist fighters here. This in turn has increased the risk of violence across the region.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has called the area "Sahelistan," likening it to remote areas in Afghanistan where US troops struggled for years to pin down the Taliban. The French Army in January intervened whole-scale in Mali to drive Islamist radicals out.

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My Comment: The territory in question is massive .... almost the size of Europe. A perfect place to hide and/or for a terror group to organize and train.

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Africa Is Becoming The New Terrorist Training Ground

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(Graphic: Craig Whitlock and Laris Karklis/Washington Post)

The New Terrorist Training Ground -- Yochi Dreazen, The Atlantic

Last year, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb did something no other modern terrorist group has: conquered a broad swath of a sovereign country—Mali. Since then, despite French intervention, northern Mali has become a jihadist front, with Islamist militants flowing in from around the world. While America remains focused on threats from the Middle East and South Asia, the new face of terror is likely to be African.

Gao, the largest city in northern Mali, is a place of extremes. It’s a sprawl of one- and two-story mud-brick houses that lack power lines and running water, but it’s also home to the garish, McMansion-style estates of Cocainebougou, or “Cocaine Town,” a deserted neighborhood that once belonged to Arab drug lords who controlled the region’s smuggling routes for hashish and cocaine but fled, fearing reprisals from local citizens who blamed them for the Islamist invasion. The city has few high schools and no universities, but many of Mali’s leading guitarists and percussionists learned their craft in Gao’s decades-old youth orchestras; it is a proudly secular city that also houses the Tomb of Askia, one of the oldest mosques in Africa, built in the 15th century to honor a regional ruler. Gao was for centuries best known as the capital of the ancient Songhai Empire, which once controlled a region larger than present-day Mali. In the summer of last year, an al‑Qaeda affiliate known as AQIM, for “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” took over Gao and made it the capital of the rump state the group created after forcing the Malian army out of the north. Months earlier, the Tuareg, a separatist minority long bent on independence, had laid the groundwork for AQIM and its Islamist allies when they captured the city. When I visited northern Mali in March of this year, a black-metal billboard the extremists had erected on the main road leading into the city was still welcoming visitors to the “Islamic City of Gao.”

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My Comment: This article is prophetic because it was posted before the Nairobi Westgate Mall Massacre and siege. And while this author focuses on the growth of radical Islamists in norther Mali .... the trend of what is happening in Mali can also be used to explain the growth of al Shabaab in Somalia.

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Al Qaeda Continues To Expand In North Africa

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Al Qaeda's Widening North African Jihad Confounds Foes -- Reuters

(Reuters) - Inquiries into the bloody assault on an Algerian gas plant are uncovering increasing evidence of contacts between the assailants and the jihadis involved in killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya nearly a year ago.

The extent of the contacts between the militants is still unclear and nobody is sure there was a direct link between the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the carnage at In Amenas, where 39 foreign hostages were killed in January.

But the findings, according to three sources with separate knowledge of U.S. investigations, shed some light on the connections between Al Qaeda affiliates stretching ever further across North and West Africa.

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My Comment: I am not surprised by Al Qaeda's growth in North Africa. Failed states. Poverty. Islamic militancy. Access to weaponry. Disaffected and frustrated men. A perfect place for Al Qaeda. But what confounds me is reading stories like this one .... Britain's foreign aid has fallen into hands of al-Qaeda, DfiD admits. This I do not understand.

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